For Vidusshi Hingad ’25, the idea of being the first in her family to leave India for college abroad was nothing short of exhilarating—and daunting. But Pomona has proven to be a home away from home for the Mumbai native.

Vidusshi Hingad ’25

“From the moment that I landed in LAX, I have been exposed to a world of growth, inclusivity and, most importantly, genuine community,” says Hingad, who has participated in the mock trial program and served on the Associated Students of Pomona College’s Senate. “I have come to know that at Pomona, people are everything,” she says.

At the beginning of this century, international students were a modest presence at Pomona College, making up only about 2% of the student body. Fast forward to today and that percentage has soared, with 12.89% of students at Pomona during the past academic year from other countries, hailing from nearly 60 nations. The growth in international enrollment has enhanced Pomona’s campus culture, creating a vibrant array of backgrounds and perspectives.

Living and studying with students from other countries provides an educational experience for U.S. students as well, says Esther Brimmer ’83, a foreign affairs expert who formerly was executive director and CEO of NAFSA: Association of International Educators, the largest nonprofit professional association devoted to international education.

“It’s extremely important for students in the United States to have the opportunity to study with students from around the world,” Brimmer says. “Many students will not be able to travel internationally. But it is a wonderful opportunity for students across the United States to benefit from learning from their colleagues in the classroom, their friends in the dorm, their friends on the sports team. It’s a great way for students to be able to get to know people from other parts of the world even if they do not or are not able to travel.”

Arriving Sight Unseen

International students sometimes arrive to begin their college careers without having so much as a campus tour or attending Admitted Students Day. Shortly after coming to Pomona as a first-year student, Hingad reached out to Assistant Vice President and Director of Admissions Adam Sapp to finally meet him in person after initially being drawn to Pomona after an older student from her high school, Rya Jetha ’23, chose it.

“I remember going home and searching it up, and suddenly everything began to click,” Hingad says. “I remember reading the statement, ‘the promise is in the place,’ and that is exactly why I applied—from small class sizes to warm weather (and people). I applied Early Decision without even visiting the campus.”

In that first face-to-face encounter with Sapp, a person she was only familiar with from afar, Hingad says she became an admirer of the way he described Pomona’s interdisciplinary education, explaining how the liberal arts approach allows knowledge to build on itself.

“What he said challenged me to think of knowledge in a way that everything just clicked,” says Hingad, explaining that the educational system in India is more rigid and requires a narrower area of focus. “Where I come from, people have their future set up from the 10th grade.”

Sapp is used to explaining the different approach at Pomona and many other U.S. colleges.

“For many [international] families, this might be the first time they hear words like liberal arts, interdisciplinary studies or guaranteed housing,” he says. “Often, we recruit in places where the higher education system works very differently from ours, so we are not just introducing a new philosophy of education, we are literally speaking a whole new language.”

Finding Talented Students

International students gathering in front of Bridges Auditorium.

Recruiting international students starts earlier for some of those reasons. Pomona often will begin to connect with students as early as ninth or 10th grade. Admissions officers traveling to other countries not only visit what are known as international schools—which generally have multinational students and multilingual instruction—but also public high schools, which typically offer that country’s national curriculum.

In addition, Pomona engages with government initiatives like EducationUSA, a U.S. State Department network of international student advising centers in more than 170 countries, as well as international nonprofits and foundations like the Davis Foundation and its United World College Scholars Program, the Grew Bancroft Foundation, the Sutton Trust and Bridge2Rwanda, among others. As an example of the effectiveness of those partnerships, Sapp says that every student admitted to Pomona’s Class of 2028 from Argentina, Uruguay, Egypt or Vietnam had a direct link to a global nonprofit partner.

“It’s important to us that we do work beyond traditional international high schools,” Sapp says. “There’s so much talent in the local high schools, and some of these high schools we just couldn’t access without the local outreach of our partners.”

Among Pomona’s longstanding partners is the Davis United World Colleges Scholars Program, which is linked to 18 United World College high schools around the world welcoming students from 160 countries. Their scholars study at almost 100 college and university partners across the U.S., including all five Claremont Colleges. During 2024-25, the foundation contributed more than $125,000 in scholarship support to Davis United World College scholars attending Pomona.

One marked difference between the international admissions process and that for U.S.-based domestic students is financial aid. For international students applying from outside the U.S., Pomona’s admissions process is what is called need-aware. Unlike the need-blind admissions policy employed for domestic applicants, for international students applying from abroad, the student’s or family’s ability to pay tuition is considered. Once admitted, however, all students receive the same type of aid package: 100% of demonstrated need is met with a package that includes a combination of Pomona grants and student work and, just like the packages for domestic students, does not include loans. In all, slightly more than half of international students at Pomona receive financial aid. By comparison, most U.S. colleges and universities do not offer significant need-based aid to international undergraduates.

“We’re incredibly lucky to have policies in place that ensure international students from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds have access to a Pomona education,” Sapp says.

Nationally, colleges suffered a “pandemic slump” in international student recruitment but those numbers have rebounded, in part because of a 35% increase in students from India, according to a recent Open Doors report sponsored by the U.S. State Department.

The top countries that sent students to Pomona for the past academic year were China (29 students), India (20), Japan (12), Greece and Kenya (11 each) and Canada (nine).

In total, 59 countries were represented by Pomona’s F-1 visa-holding students. (An F-1 visa allows a nonimmigrant to study in the U.S. as long as they are a full-time student enrolled in an approved academic program and are proficient in English, among other criteria.)

Student Support Services

Once an international student enrolls at Pomona, the College’s International Student and Scholar Services Office steps in to help with the F-1 visa process. Kathy Quispe, assistant director of international student and scholar services, notes that while her office directly supports students holding F-1 visas during their four years at Pomona, it also provides support to students who are U.S. citizens but grew up abroad. All international students, regardless of immigration status, are invited to the international student orientation. And all international students have the option of being paired with an International Student Mentorship Program (ISMP) mentor who will help them adjust to life at Pomona as well as life in the U.S.

Young Seo Kim ’26

While F-1 visa students share similarities with U.S. citizens who were born and/or raised abroad, they face a burden unique to them: hurdles of paperwork. The paperwork continues throughout their four years at Pomona. If they want to work on campus, that requires applying for a Social Security number. If they want an off-campus internship, that will require specific authorization to avoid being in violation of their F-1 visa status.

In addition, F-1 status has a big impact on an international student’s academic and career choices. “F-1 visa-holding students can work in the U.S. up to a year after graduation, as long as the job relates to their major, but for STEM majors it goes up to two years,” says Quispe. “This year, of our 33 graduating seniors, 27 are graduating in STEM.” Quispe adds that this makes Pomona a place for international students who major in STEM to still enjoy the full offerings of a liberal arts education.

Beyond helping students navigate government requirements, staff in the International Student and Scholar Services Office are fine-tuned to news affecting different parts of the world.

International students gathering for their end-of-year dinner in April 2023 to say a farewell to graduating seniors.

“While many of our students have connections to all parts of the world, our international students tend to be more impacted when there are world crises,” says Carolina De la Rosa Bustamante, director of the Oldenborg Center, Pomona’s language-focused residence hall, dining hall and center for other internationally oriented programs. “When there are geopolitical tensions or natural disasters, international students are the first population that we think of.”

When news of a recent attempted coup in Guatemala reached Quispe, she sought out Young Seo Kim ’26, an international student born and raised in Guatemala to Korean parents, to ask if she was OK.

“It was a very small action, but it was so considerate,” Kim says, describing the different types of support and help that she has received. “She made sure I was doing OK mentally and physically. She was making sure that I knew I had her support in case I needed to leave the college for an emergency,” she adds. “International students are far away from home, so having someone who understands your story and helps you no matter what we need at times is important.

“Obviously, you’re going to be homesick,” says Kim, who appreciates the special events organized by Pomona and ISMP during key times of the school year like fall break and spring break when many students leave campus—but others, like her, stay behind and tend to miss their families more during those times.

Kim recalls spending Thanksgiving on Pomona’s campus among international friends for an ISMP-hosted dinner. “They had different cuisines so people could feel like they’re back home,” says Kim, remembering how the Salvadoran and Chinese foods at one dinner included pupusas and other dishes that were similar to Guatemalan and Korean cuisines. “They had tortillas and fajitas and you could make your own small taco and that really reminded me of home.”

Hingad recalls her first year when she performed spoken-word poetry at an open-mic event on campus. Two years later, a lot has changed, but that feeling remains the same. Her work, titled “Home,” resonated deeply with many people. “The piece was about small impacts that people make and how they compound to make 91711 [Pomona’s ZIP code] a home,” she says. “It’s the shared experience of different people coming from different backgrounds with one thing in common: good parts of humanity.”

Like Hingad, many international students are making a choice that no one else in their families has made.

“Everyone knows we have a lot of students at Pomona who are trailblazers, but for our international students, I think they deserve just a little bit of extra credit,” Sapp says. “To travel five, six, sometimes even 7,000 miles away from home to pursue an education that might be totally different than what is offered in their home country—it astonishes me to think about how much bravery that requires. It’s also a vote of confidence in the Pomona education. We know how transformative this place can be, so working hard to open doors to talent around the world and educate the next generation of global leaders makes total sense.”

The center will be a place where disciplines are interwoven in surprising ways, problems are confronted from fresh angles and people from all over the world come together to ask big questions and discover new answers. The center will facilitate and strengthen ties between our faculty and students—through academic inquiry, research and creative endeavors—as well as to communities both close to home and around the globe.

The Center for Global Engagement will connect our campus community in Southern California to the world. Encompassing a residence hall, a dining hall, language study and flexible academic spaces, the newly imagined center will enhance learning across languages, cultures and disciplines. It will be located where the Oldenborg Center for Modern Languages, built in the 1960s, now stands—but the project represents far more than simply swapping out one building for a newer one. The new center will be a completely novel living, breathing liberal arts laboratory.

With a fundraising goal of $50 million, the 111,000-square-foot global center will be one of the most ambitious and complex construction projects at Pomona in many decades, and the College is taking the time and effort to get it right. Once key steps in planning, design and fundraising are met, construction is scheduled to begin in summer 2026.

The center will support the College’s larger effort to ensure that every Pomona student will meaningfully engage with global learning, whether from abroad or here in the U.S.

For more information, preview the Center for Global Engagement, follow the links for the full video and additional details on planning and design, as well as the larger effort of the Global Pomona Project.

Sam Glick ’04

PCM: You’ve served 16 years on the board, with four more years ahead. What’s the most significant change you’ve seen for the College during that time? And why is it important?

Glick: For many years, and many generations, we talked about a liberal arts education as being this almost kind of monastic pursuit. It was a way to study, and a way to examine the world, where you went away for four years and you learned how to adopt a new lens, learned how to look at the world in a different way. Pomona taught you skills, and you would then be launched out into the world, ready to make a difference. The shift I’ve seen in my time on the board is that Pomona is now very much part of the world. The proverbial Pomona bubble has been popped. I think it’s been popped from the inside and from the outside. I don’t know which one came first, but we’ve long known that the liberal arts are contemporary and relevant to all of the issues that the world is facing; now engaging directly with those issues is fully part of a Pomona education, not something that comes afterwards.

Look at our faculty, from their diverse backgrounds before coming to Pomona to the kinds of research they do now—much of which deals directly with real-world challenges related to the environment, social policy, healthcare, global politics, artificial intelligence and more. Look at the Draper Center, which is an extraordinary resource that allows us to bring the talents of Pomona people to the communities around us. Look at the kinds of speakers we bring to campus. We are taking the power of the liberal arts and using it to influence the world while we make the issues of the world front and center on our campus. That’s truly compelling.

PCM: How has the bubble popped, as you put it, from the inside?

Glick: I think the greatest internal change is a far greater appreciation for the shadow that Pomona casts. When I was a student, it was almost a joke: We had the “Harvard: The Pomona College of the East” T-shirts in the Coop Store. All your friends thought you went to Cal Poly Pomona. We were proud of Pomona being this sort of secret that it was. But first under David Oxtoby and, now under President [G. Gabrielle] Starr, we have become far more confident in our role in the world. We have said to ourselves that we may only educate 1,700 or so students at a given time, but we can have an influence on the course of higher education in ways far greater than that. Whether through the kind of thought leadership that President Starr has been doing, or the STEM cohort programs that have served as models for other colleges, or the amazing Benton Museum [of Art] that really is a regional resource, Pomona is not a secret anymore. We’re still appropriately modest, and I don’t ever want us to lose that. But we really do have a big impact on the world, well beyond the amazing students we launch. And to me that’s incredibly exciting.

PCM: Reflecting on your own time at Pomona, how did our version of the liberal arts shape your life?

Glick: Oh, in so many ways. I grew up in Southern California. We lived in the low desert; my family was in the citrus nursery business in Thermal, about halfway between Palm Springs and the Salton Sea. I went to a big public high school and the whole junior class took the ASVAB [the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery]. We had four counselors for the whole 2,000 or so of us. If you were a good student, you got handed a UC [University of California] application, and off you went.

I had an English teacher whose husband had gone to one of The Claremont Colleges and she said to my best friend and me, “You know, you should take a look at those schools in Claremont.” We were 17 and you got a free day off school if you were on a college tour, which was all the incentive we needed. And so we drove to Claremont.

When I toured Pomona, it was fundamentally different than any place I had ever seen before. The campus was gorgeous; it looked like the nicest golf courses in the desert where I grew up. I sat in on a class, and I met students who were talking about all sorts of ideas I hadn’t even imagined. And so I applied Early Decision, as did my best friend. We both got in and never looked back.

Until I arrived at Pomona, I thought the liberal arts were invented in Claremont, California; I didn’t even know this was a category of school, honest to goodness. I would have gone to UC Riverside otherwise. I had toured the Citrus Experiment Station there, since citrus was the family business. And I would have done perfectly well, but I wouldn’t be the person I am today. Pomona College taught me to write and communicate and analyze and think and be creative in ways that I just hadn’t considered before.

I came to Pomona, as many high school students do, thinking there was a right and a wrong way to do things and as long as you were right, that was all that mattered. Pomona taught me the art of taking multiple perspectives, of persuasion, of immersing yourself in a different way of thinking. You still need to know what the facts are; that’s critical. But so much of what I do is taking others’ perspectives, bouncing them up against my own and communicating in ways that hopefully allow both of those perspectives to evolve. And frankly, that’s how I’ve led the board for nine years. It’s come full circle in that way.

PCM: You have a compelling Pomona story. At the same time, there’s deep and growing skepticism about higher education. Why do you think that is? And how can Pomona play a role in addressing that?

Glick: Frankly, some of that skepticism is warranted. You know, we have—and by “we” I mean not just Pomona College but higher education broadly, or at least elite higher education—for the vast majority of our history been more exclusive than inclusive. Elite colleges and universities are probably the only charitable organizations in the country that brag about how few people we serve. If you went to a hospital or a soup kitchen and they said, “Isn’t it amazing, we turned away more than 90% of the people who could benefit from us,” you’d think that was absurd. But when we have elite higher ed publishing admissions rates that are in the single digits, that’s fundamentally what we’re saying, right?

I think higher education needs to tackle how we become more inclusive. How do we become more accessible? How do we become more affordable? How do we make it so more people can benefit from the wonderful things that we do? Those are real challenges that we should take seriously.

Some of the skepticism, however, is more about the nature of higher education as an enterprise—a nature that shouldn’t change. The students we attract are not fully formed; we are part of that formation as students try on different ideas and test the boundaries on all sorts of issues. Similarly, the best faculty are bold and provocative, engaging in the major issues of the day. And they should be. We stand for excellence and for progress and for academic freedom. Sometimes that makes people uncomfortable. That’s the nature of it. What’s changed in recent years is that, due to the internet and social media, the broader public has hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute exposure to the messiness that makes college campuses what they are. The boundaries between our community and broader society are blurring. That’s one of the downsides to the bubble popping.

At Pomona, we are doing many things that are amazing. Our commitment to financial aid is second to none. We have made great strides in terms of not just attracting a diverse student body, but creating an environment where every student can thrive. Our faculty are extraordinary, and our students learn from them and work on research with them shoulder-to-shoulder. I have, in my role as board chair, probably talked to hundreds if not thousands of alumni. And the most common reason people feel connected to Pomona is because some faculty member changed their lives. Very few schools can say all of this. We must continue to lead in these areas.

I also believe liberal arts colleges, and Pomona specifically, are more important than ever. When we talk about the skills of the liberal arts, we often refer to analyzing and writing; perhaps presenting or speaking as well. In today’s society, I’d add listening to that. Listening may be the most important skill of the liberal arts. Taking someone else’s perspective requires training and practice. At our best, we are a place designed for dialogue, designed for people to understand each other as humans, not in positional kinds of ways. We must lead on that.

PCM: President Starr has often alluded to the underrepresentation of students from the middle-income spectrum in the U.S., and we’ve launched an initiative to attract and enroll more middle-income students. Why is this important?

Glick: I’m a huge supporter of where President Starr is going in terms of increasing the number of middle-income students who have access to the life-changing education we offer. We have made great strides in terms of racial and ethnic diversity, gender diversity, bringing in international students, you name it. But like most institutions like us, we skew towards those students with high incomes at least by national standards, with a meaningful but smaller number of students of very modest means. Someone described it to me as a “whale” distribution. If you imagine what the silhouette of a whale looks like, that’s about right.

When you have that kind of “whale” distribution, it changes the environment on campus, in that it creates a polarized environment of haves and have-nots. And I think that’s important to address. It also means that the people who grow up as the children of teachers and nurses and accountants are largely being served by a different class of school, which is mostly state institutions. They’re not even considering Pomona College, and we see that. Those state institutions are perfectly good. But they’re not providing the kind of liberal arts experience that you and I were just talking about, and I think everybody deserves access to it. So it’s an issue we have to take on in the years ahead.

PCM: The past academic year brought significant protest movements to campus, with many students and faculty pushing for steps such as divestment from—and/or an academic boycott of—Israel. Other people were opposed and concerned about the climate on campus for different viewpoints. How do you respond to this?

Glick: I try to start from a human place, before I remind myself of my responsibilities as board chair. The current war continues to take an immense human toll, and as we speak today people are starving and dying and living in fear in ways most of us who are privileged enough to live in the U.S. can’t even imagine. We need to acknowledge that Pomona is not isolated from that world; we are part of that world, and many of our students, our staff, our faculty and our alumni are sad and angry and frustrated. We need to make Pomona an environment in which people can express those feelings and can channel their anger and their hurt and their disappointment into productive, ethical activism to make the world a better place. We have a long tradition of activism at Pomona College. It is not lost on me that the epicenter of the activities of the past year has been Marston Quad, which is mere steps from where some of the archives of Myrlie Evers-Williams [Class of 1968], the great civil rights icon, are kept.

At the same time, we also need to make Pomona a place where everybody feels welcome, safe and free to express themselves, regardless of their identity or worldview. And this particular conflict, perhaps more so than almost any conflict, has political, religious and racial dimensions we can’t ignore. Even if there happen to be views that a majority of people on campus hold, those aren’t institutional views. And I think that’s one of the really important things I have learned as board chair: The role of the board is to provide resources and ensure the conditions exist for meaningful, productive, inclusive analysis and debate, but not to take sides in those debates. Sometimes that role can be frustrating for trustees, all of whom hold their own personal views, too. But it’s a critical one as we lead Pomona for the long term.

PCM: As we close, what do you see as the most urgent issue on the horizon for Pomona College?

Glick: Pomona College is in a very good place. One of the things I’ve gotten to do in this role as board chair is to learn about the higher education landscape more generally. And it’s clear that there are institutions that are struggling with attracting enough students. They are struggling to attract faculty, and to pay those faculty. They have facilities that are in bad shape. We don’t have those issues at Pomona, and I’m very grateful to the generations of trustees and donors before me who have made that the case.

There are two big challenges for Pomona. The first is that we not get too comfortable. It would be easy for Pomona just to keep being what we are today while the world changes around us. And it’s part of why I’m so proud that we recruited President Starr to come here. She challenges us every day. We can’t be complacent. We can’t say that we’ve just always done things a particular way and be satisfied.

The other challenge for Pomona is countering the polarization of society. We have seen the effects of polarization on campus in this past year with the war in the Middle East. What we do as a liberal arts institution does not work if we can’t listen and talk to each other, if we can’t take each other’s perspectives and genuinely get inside each other’s minds. We must continue to produce students who are both broad-minded and open-minded. To me, that’s critical.

The word unique is overused, but the experiences of the Class of 2024 truly were. Most of the newest graduates of Pomona College spent their first year of college on Zoom because of the pandemic. Their final day at Pomona was unprecedented too: They boarded buses for Los Angeles, where they graduated inside the storied Shrine Auditorium on May 12 after protesters occupied the Marston Quad stage where Commencement was to be held.

To get a glimpse of their resilience and plans for the future, check out Senior Year at Pomona College, a four-part documentary that follows four members of the Class of 2024 as they navigate their final year on campus.

Meet the seniors below—and watch the full series Senior Year: The Documentary on Youtube.

Timi Adelakun ’24

DEGREE:
Theatre and Molecular Biology

ACCOMPLISHMENTS:
ASPC President
Received Hive Student Creativity Grant
Directed the Play Our Place With a Film Documentary

NEXT STEPS:
Pursuing Job Opportunities in Film and Television Production

María Durán González ’24

DEGREE:
Environmental Analysis

ACCOMPLISHMENTS:
Recipient of Oldenborg Research and Travel Grant
Studied Environmental Storytelling in Ecuador

NEXT STEPS:
Accepted to a Master’s Program at the University of Cambridge

Phillip Kong ’24

DEGREE:
Molecular Biology

ACCOMPLISHMENTS:
Mentor in International Student Mentorship Program
Job in Research at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston

NEXT STEPS:
Become a Physician-Scientist

Alexandra Turvey ’24

DEGREE:
Biology

ACCOMPLISHMENTS:
Goldwater and Beckman Scholar
2-Time NCAA Div. III Champion in Freestyle Relays
Competed in Canada’s Olympic Swimming Trials

NEXT STEPS:
Harvard/MIT M.D.-Ph.D. Program